While many businesses across Europe are confident in their ability to comply with regulations like the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), they often struggle to find the right tools to accomplish the necessary compliance tasks, a new report by insightsoftware has found.
The 2025 ESG Insights and Challenges Report explored the challenges businesses face in meeting ESG reporting requirements, particularly the challenges finance leaders encounter in gathering, integrating, and analysing data from multiple sources.
‘Complying with regulations like the CSRD and overcoming reporting roadblocks remain highly important for global organisations to meet their ESG goals,’ insightsoftware noted.
Among the findings, more than half (52%) of firms rely on data from more than five sources for ESG reporting, while 58% state that they are exploring new technology solutions to enhance their ESG reporting capabilities.
Unable to scale
At the same time, however, some 92% of businesses fear that their current ESG reporting processes will not scale to meet future regulatory demands, with many citing data security and privacy issues as a key concern (59%).
More than half (52%) of decision-makers remain heavily uncertain and confused about the requirements of CSRD, despite the fact that companies that do business in the EU need to comply with its requirements.
Data collection is seen as the biggest hurdle for firms when it comes to ESG reporting successes, with 95% citing it as a challenge, and more than half (52%) spending more than four weeks each year solely on the practice of collecting data.
Business risk
“Without the proper tools, global businesses risk hampering their organisation’s ability to comply with ESG regulatory requirements,” commented insightsoftware general manager, EPM and controllership, Monica Boydston.
The report was conducted in collaboration with Hanover Research and surveyed 400 ESG decision-makers across France, Germany, Finland, Sweden, and the UK. Read more here.
